2022 Vintage Summary: Twelve months ago, at the end of April, there was not a lot of optimistic thoughts to have about what the 2022 vintage was going to look like. A valley-wide frost event had seemed to have decimated massive swaths of young shoots and that there might be 10-15% of a normal harvest overall and none in some places. In the 50+ year history of the Oregon wine industry this was as grim a time across the board as probably has ever existed. Coming on the heels of the devastating wildfires of 2020 that basically ruined any and all Pinot Noir fruit still hanging (another vintage with nothing to bottle and sell seemed to have the possibilities of actually being financially ruinous as opposed to just a massive gut-punch). There was a 2-3 week stretch over the last part of April and beginning of May where it seemed like you could feel the impending doom hanging over the valley like some sort of supernatural storm cloud. By late May we realized that we would be receiving fruit beyond what we were expecting just a few weeks prior. Grapevines have, seemingly, a capacity to go through their life cycle even in the face of some serious adversity. Secondary buds had shown up and were turning into shoots and those shoots had flowers on them. By mid-July it was clear that in some vineyards were going to have fruit sets higher than what we would have anticipated at any point during the year! What was once a time of feeling depressed and finding it hard to have higher spirits turned into a scramble to prepare for a harvest of a size we never would have expected at any point! When the dust had all settled and the fruit was all in, fermented and sent to barrel it turns out we had our second largest harvest ever, surpassed only by the 2021 vintage. On top of it the quality seems to be not only better than hoped, but truly excellent. The Pinots are just starting to turn the corner from being relatively raw wines to beginning their polishing phase where they start to strut the first looks at their final selves. It is exciting to see. Loads of red fruit and velvety textures seem to rule the day in 2022. We will have our darker fruited sites and our lighter sites but, in general, the best characteristics of each wine from each vineyard are what we are experiencing as the front and center natures of the wines. So, a roller-coaster ride for sure; fast moving highs and lows with a little more excitement than we would prefer, but in the end, everything is fine and we had a great time living the experience.
This bottling allows us to accomplish two things that are very important to us as a winery. The first thing is that it allows us to be incredibly detailed about the barrels we select for our vineyard designated wines, so they true expressions of the site on a year in and year out basis. The Willamette Valley Pinot Noir bottling “Reserve” is almost entirely made up of barrels that simply were not included in a more prestigious bottling, which allows us to choose from larger sections of our diverse vineyards. Secondly, it allows us to create a blended wine that has a degree of consistency to it each vintage that is of incredibly high-quality and will retail for under $30.
In short, this wine is a smoking deal! The 2017 Willamette Valley Reserve was rated as the #39 wine by The Wine Spectator and 93pts because of its unusual combination of quality, price and availability.
This bottling comes from terrific sources. The 2019 has a make-up of unique pedigree for a wine at its pricing. Slightly over 33% comes from our Estate Vineyard from which we bottled 4 individual single vineyard/block bottlings in 2019. Other sources of significance are Freedom Hill Vineyard which is one of the most famous (and deservedly so) sites in the state, Corrine (formerly Olenik) Vineyard which we have bottled single vineyard Pinots from since 2009, Wind Ridge Vineyard which is an older Ribbon Ridge AVA site, Anderson Family Vineyard which is new to us but is a 30 year-old organically farmed site in the Dundee Hills (and we are making a vineyard designated Pinot from it in 2019) and a vineyard so famous that the winery that owns it won’t let us put the name of the vineyard on the vineyard designated bottling of it that we do let alone tell you it is one of the mainstays in our least expensive wine! You get the picture. This isn’t throw away stuff mixed together and then hope for the best. This is an intentional wine filled with basically declassified single vineyard quality wine in it.
This wine carries the breadth of the winery in other ways as well. From completely destemmed grapes to 100% whole cluster fermentations, all winemaking stylistic decisions are represented within this bottling. The two most important AVAs in the Willamette Valley to us (and likely the two most prestigious and sought after) are Ribbon Ridge (where we are located) and the Dundee Hills. 75% of this wine comes from those two AVAs. To show those in their pure fruit form about 75% of the volume of this wine comes from neutral barrels while less than 3% of are new barrels.
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